Group challenges sage grouse finding

An environmental group is challenging plans by the Interior Department to classify sage grouse as merely a candidate for protection under the Endangered Species Act and not list the bird as threatened or endangered.

The department announced Friday that federal protection as an endangered or threatened species is warranted but precluded by higher priorities - species deemed in more dire need of protection right now.

Western Watersheds questioned that finding in a supplemental complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Boise, Idaho.

"The sage grouse is, in our judgment, as qualified as any species on the candidate list for the protections of the act," Jon Marvel, director of Western Watersheds, said Monday. "Of course they should be acting on all of these species, and why aren't they?"

The new complaint calls the candidate species list "a black hole from which few species ever emerge, and under which they receive no ESA protection." The decision to put the sage grouse on the list was "arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law," the group claims.

An Interior spokeswoman declined to comment because the matter is being litigated.

Western Watersheds sued in 2006 over a previous decision not to list sage grouse. U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill found that the earlier decision was politically motivated and told the department to re-evaluate, leading to Friday's announcement.

A supplemental complaint is filed to bring forth facts and claims that happen after an initial complaint in a case, said Laird Lucas, a Western Watersheds attorney.

The notion that sage grouse aren't a high priority for protection is implausible after the government spent considerable time and money studying whether they deserved protection, Lucas said

"They can't now claim they don't have the money to move forward. It does not make sense," Lucas said. "And that, to me, says really it is a political determination at the end."

Sage grouse are football-sized birds that live in the sagebrush in California, Colorado, the Dakotas, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming and western Canada.

Species placed on the candidate list are classified on a scale of one through 12, with lower-numbered species deemed in more dire need of protection. Sage grouse have been given a score of eight, two-thirds of the way down the list.

The candidate species finding was relatively good news for the wind and oil and gas industries, which rely on developing portions of the West's vast landscapes.

A species on the list can be raised as a concern ahead of development on public land, but the welfare of a candidate species doesn't have to be taken into consideration by law. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reviews the candidate species list annually.

Only a finding that federal protection for sage grouse is not warranted would have been better from industry's perspective.

About half of the birds are believed to live in Wyoming, where large areas of sage grouse habitat also are prime spots for natural gas development. In Nevada, the birds are challenged by invasive cheatgrass, which is prone to frequent wildfires that burn up native sagebrush.